She was born on 12th January 1939 in Warsaw and has lived there ever since. She entered the world of fashion around the same time when she entered adulthood. First, in October 1957, she was photographed by Wojciech Plewiński and anonymously became a cover-girl of Przekrój magazine. She later worked as a model. In 1958 she started working in Centralne Laboratorium Spółdzielczości Pracy (editor's note: Cooperative Work Central Laboratory) and, for almost a decade, cooperated with the biggest fashion houses: Moda Polska, Telimena, Leda and Warszawskie Zakłady Przemysłu Odzieżowego (editor's note: Warsaw Clothing Manufacture Company). It was there that she started her career as a fashion designer.
However, before this happened, Hase had collaborated with Barbara Hoff, the author of the fashion column in Przekrój, for 7 years (between 1960 and 1967). She was a model and presented the collections that Hoff designed for photo shoots before she started to sell them in Centrum Department Stores. The shoots were social events and featured, among others, Gerard Wilk, Monika Dzienisiewicz, Daniel Olbrychski, Krystyna Morgenstern, Krzysztof Litwin, Andrzej Kurylewicz, Wojciech Karolak, Małgorzata Braunek, Wojciech Pszoniak.
The year 1967 was a breakthrough one for Hase in many aspects. In February she married Wowo Bielicki, a director of stage performances, who was also associated with the Bim-Bom cabaret. In October she started studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, first at the faculty of architecture, later – at the faculty of graphic arts. In November she designed the collection 'Kozak Look' (translator's note: 'Cossack Look') and organised a fashion show that Warsaw had never seen before.
It all started when she spent a month in Moscow as a model of the Warsaw Clothing Manufacture Company. She brought a big fur hat with her. When she was trying it on in front of a mirror, she was wondering if something could be sewn from it. 'Sit down and draw, maybe you'll come up with something', said Wowo Bielicki.
And so she drew and took her designs to the Warsaw Clothing Manufacture Company, which was later transformed into the Cora Clothing Manufacture Company. Its manager, Józef Syroka, one of the managers from the period of the Polish People's Republic who were able to cope with the problems caused by the system (Jerzy Antkowiak called him 'a socialist who loved America'), said 'let's do it'. Hase elaborated:
Józef Syroka thought in a modern way. And I, before showing him my sketches with designs, suggested to make a fashion show instead of a gala for the 50th anniversary of the revolution.
That was because the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution was coming at that time. Instead of an ordinary celebration or a presentation of an industrial collection, a fashion show with music was organised. It was directed by Wowo Bielicki. First in Dziekanka and Stodoła Club, later in Ośrodek Przyjaźni Polsko-Radzieckiej (translator's note: Polish-Soviet Friendship Centre). The themes from The Free Wind operetta by Dunayevsky were played in a big beat tempo, along with Yellow Submarine by the Beatles or the Russian Song Katyusha, and models were appearing on the catwalk to the rhythm of the music – Anna Karenina, a superintendent, Semyon Budyonny, a soldier of the Red Army, and Lenin in a tweed jacket at the end. A single-row jacket, a vest and a miniskirt, plus a flat cap and a spotted tie: that was the outfit in which Grażyna Hase ended her career of a model and became a fashion designer.
Teresa Kuczyńska wrote in the magazine Ty i Ja:
We saw the most beautiful collection with Russian and Soviet elements in Warsaw. We welcome a new fashion designer who's full of enthusiasm, invention and determination.
Another comment by Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz, published in the magazine 'Kultura', praised the 'ultramodern dresses inspired by the austere forms from 50 years back'.
In an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza Grażyna Hase said:
For the first time I felt I were a fashion designer 12 years after the debut. Spółdzielnia Modny Strój (translator's note: Fashionable Outfit Cooperative) organised a birthday party for Jadwiga Grabowska, the founder of the Moda Polska enterprise and the most important figure in post-war fashion. I asked her for an autograph. She wrote: 'To Grażyna Hase, one of the few ones to whom I hand over the position in my beloved profession with greatest pleasure'. That was something. Only then did I decide that I can call myself a fashion designer.
She kept on designing. At the end of the 60s she had her own TV programme created in cooperation with Wowo Bielicki. The most important things happen on television, but the series is accompanied by outdoor events, such as the fashion show during the convention of the Union of Socialist Youth from Silesia and Zagłębie, where Edward Gierek read a letter from Władysław Gomułka (December 1968) or a show in Moscow celebrating the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the communist regime in Poland that was broadcast by the Soviet television. Here's what Hase told Gazeta Wyborcza about her work in that period:
That was a job commissioned by the television. I found out that I had the Union of Socialist Youth present in front of me only when the curtain went up. I don't want to make a hero out of myself, though. I didn't fight with the system. I lived in it. When the programme Music and Fashion was removed without the last episode being broadcast, we went to London, later spent a year in West Berlin and had a wonderful time. We came back, however, because at the beginning of the 70s everybody thought that things would improve. For me these were great times. I worked a lot: for the industry, for companies and on my own. I designed the sheepskin coats in the style of the Polish highlanders that have been famous since then and that were sold in Cepelia's shop on the Fifth Avenue in New York.